Article Databases and Indexes

Art Full Text, produced by The HW Wilson Company, is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts articles from periodicals published throughout the world. There is full-text coverage for selected periodicals. Coverage includes English-language periodicals, yearbooks, and museum bulletins, as well as periodicals published in French, Italian, German, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish. In addition to articles, Art Full Text indexes reproductions of works of art that appear in indexed periodicals. Indexing coverage begins 1984; abstracting coverage begins with January 1994. The abstracts range from 50 to 300 words and describe the content and scope of the source articles. Full-text coverage begins in 1997.

Note:A&HCI is no longer searchable as a separate index.
(1) Start by clicking on this link, which takes you to the Web of Science main page.
(2) In the search box enter one or more key words.
(3) On the next page, under Research Domains, select Arts and Humanities to limit your results.
(4) Hints: Your choice of words can influence the results. For example, "hydraulic fracturing" will favor science-journal articles; "fracking" will retrieve more articles in humanities and social-science journals.

The Dance Catalog lists works about all forms of dance, from all cultures, in print and other media. It includes materials in many languages and serves as an index to an international range of dance periodicals.

Includes the full text of plays from across the history of the theatre, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day. Includes non-English-language works in translation, scholarly and critical editions, first night program texts, and critical analysis and contextual information. Also includes over 500 images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos.

Contains all of the content available in International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance as well as full text for 100 titles, including Canadian Theatre Review, Dance Chronicle, Dance Teacher, Modern Drama, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Research in Dance Education, Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance, TDR: The Drama Review, Theater, and many more. Additional full text available includes more than 50 books & monographs such as Art and the Performance of Memory, Avant Garde Theatre, British Realist Theatre, Community Theatre, History of European Drama and Theatre, Learning Through Theatre, Opera, Performance Theory, Popular Theatres of Nineteenth Century France, Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, Sourcebook on Feminist Theatre and Performance, Theatre and the World, Twentieth-Century Actor Training, Who's Who in Contemporary World Theatre, World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and many more.

This database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 260 international periodicals, plus full text for more than 100 of the indexed journals. The database currently includes half a million records, the majority from the most recent ten years of each journal. IIPA covers a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television and more.

Index to full-text collection of journals in literary theory, classics, history and cultural studies, philosophy, film, theater and performing arts, political science, and mathematics. From Johns Hopkins University Press. The full text of a limited number of individual monographs is also available for titles that the Libraries have purchased. Users can limit their search results to include only the full text content that the University of Minnesota has access to.

The world's most comprehensive bibliographic resources for all aspects of sport and fitness. Includes Internet sites, conference papers, journal articles, unpublished papers and theses. Includes Full-text access to over 350 journals.

The world's largest academic multi-disciplinary database. Includes full text access to over 4,000 scholarly (peer-reviewed) publications back to 1975. A great place to start your research on any topic. Find search tips on their help page.

This resource is licensed by the MINITEX Library Information Network with state appropriations from the Minnesota Higher Education Services Office (MHESO) and the Minnesota Department of Education. MasterFILE Premier provides full text for more than 2,000 general magazines covering a broad range of disciplines. It includes Magill Book Reviews, reference and travel books, biographies, full text primary source documents, American Heritage Dictionary and an Image Collection of 107,135 photos, maps and flags.

Find books, journals, articles, maps, music scores, sound recordings, films, theses/dissertations, machine-readable data files, and any other materials available in libraries worldwide. This covers all subject areas. Request items through Interlibrary Loan using the ILLiad link on each item's record. WorldCat is produced by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.)

The second edition of this dictionary is a unique single volume reference on all aspects of dance performance. The work covers all aspects of the diverse dance world from classical ballet to modern, from flamenco to hip-hop, from tap to South Asian dance forms and includes detailed entries on technical terms, steps, styles, works, and countries, in addition to many biographies of dancers, choreographers, and companies.

Concise as well as scholarly articles on a wide range of subjects. Also includes links to related Internet resources, and the Britannica Book of the Year. Search tip: When combining words in search, capitalize AND. For example: revolution AND 1848

With nearly 2,000 articles written by scholars from fifty countries, the Encyclopedia covers the full spectrum of dance: theatrical, ritual, dance-drama, folk, traditional, ethnic, and social dance. Cultural and national overviews are accompanied by entries on dance forms, music and costumes, performances, and biographies of dancers and choreographers

"This cornerstone of the World of Art series is a succinct, vivid and authoritative guide to the rich history of western dance in all its incarnations from 16th-century court ballet to the genre-shattering contortions of 21st-century theatrical dance. Updated for the new millennium to feature the latest styles, performers and technology."

"Organized chronologically by the decades in which innovators were born or dance organizations were founded, it covers more than 110 choreographers, companies, institutions, and dancers from both modern dance and ballet, and from around the world. Readers can view clips of dances from over 220 Internet search addresses that illustrate the text. Videographies are provided at the end of each chapter for viewing complete dances and documentaries."--P. [4] of cover.

Dance intersects with ethnicity in a powerful variety of ways and in a broad set of venues. Dance practices and attitudes about ethnicity have sometimes been the source of outright discord, such as when African Americans were—and sometimes still are—told that their bodies are “not right” for ballet, when Anglo Americans painted their faces black to perform in minstrel shows, when nineteenth-century Christian missionaries banned the performance of particular native dance traditions throughout much of Polynesia, and when the Spanish conquistadors and church officials banned sacred Aztec dance rituals. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe to investigate what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. The chapters in the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical moments and associated lived identities. In bringing modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the chapters ask the reader to contemplate previous categories of folk, ethnic, classical, and modern. From this standpoint, the book considers how dance maintains, challenges, resists, or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior categories. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity.

This anthology offers contemporary perspectives on dance in the context of the popular screen. It analyzes the role played by the dancing body in popular culture and its multi-layered meanings in film, television, music videos, video games, commercials, and Internet sites such as YouTube. It explores how dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus, and how the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style set in motion multiple choreographies of identity such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. It also considers the types of bodies that are associated with specific dances and their relation to power, access, and agency, as well as the role(s) of a specific film in the genealogy of Hollywood dance films. The book is divided into five sections that examine dance in films such as Moulin Rouge!, Dance Girl Dance, Dirty Dancing, and Save the Last Dance; the different aspects of commercial dance films in the context of identity politics, technology, commercialism, and the politics of moving bodies; how dance and its practice are constructed in films as a form of self-discovery and individual expression; the impact of music videos on popular dance and its dissemination; and how dance video games such as Dance Central influence concepts of choreography, embodiment, and dance pedagogy.

This title collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics, it addresses the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theatre and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by investigating other such moments from pagan mimes of late antiquity to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests.

Internet Resources

The DHC has converted the exhibition to a permanent online resource which provides accessible scholarly writing, still and moving images, and research guides for each subject. One hundred new essays of 1,000-2,000 words have been commissioned from an array of dance scholars, academics, critics, advanced students, dancers and choreographers. Each Treasure has an individual page, with the introductions written by scholars Norton Owen and Lynn Garafola for the traveling exhibition, images and video clips, and links to the new essays and resources for further research. The exhibition is intended as an educational resource to improve dance literacy, as a tribute to the achievements and legacy of American dance, and as a sampling of the best in dance history and critical writing.

The Web site of the DHC includes a searchable database of finding aids to over 50 collections of primary resources in dance history held by member libraries, as well as information, tools, and training resources for dance research and documentation.

Humanities Commons is a trusted, nonprofit network where humanities scholars can create a professional profile, discuss common interests, develop new publications, and share their work. The Humanities Commons network is open to anyone.

Multimedia Materials

ARTstor is a cross-disciplinary image database. It offers collections of approximately 300,000 art images and descriptive information covering art, architecture and archeology. ARTstor's accompanying software tools will support a wide range of pedagogical and research uses including: viewing and analyzing images through features such as zooming and panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and creating and delivering presentations both online and offline. How to use ARTstor: http://artstor.libguides.com/students

OCLC's Catalog of Art Museum Images Online offers art images that are rights-cleared for educational use. CAMIO is a growing online collection documenting works of art from around the world, representing the collections of prominent museums. CAMIO highlights the creative output of cultures around the world, from prehistoric to contemporary times, and covering the complete range of expressive forms. Includes about 95,000 art images"”photographs, paintings, sculpture, decorative and utilitarian objects, prints, drawings and watercolors, jewelry and costumes, textiles and architecture"”plus audio, video and mixed media. CAMIO is licensed for use by students, faculty, and researchers at subscribing institutions. Works of art may be used for educational and research purposes during the term of the subscription, if they are properly credited. Images may not be published or otherwise distributed.

"The Digital Content Library (DCL) consists of around 300,000 items from teaching and research collections across the University of Minnesota. Support is provided for just about any digital file format including images, videos, audio, 3-D objects, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDFs."

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. Individuals can access a trove of tens of thousands of images across these institutions through DPLA's search interface (by selecting the "images" filter on results after performing a keyword search). Alternatively, consider using the OpenPics app. (http://dp.la/apps/6) to find images from the DPLA (and other repositories).

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library is the largest and most comprehensive archive in the world devoted to the documentation of dance. Chronicling the art of dance in all its forms, the Division acts as much more than a library. We preserve the history of dance by gathering diverse written, visual, and aural resources, and work to ensure the art form's continuity through active documentation and educational programs.
Founded in 1944, the Dance Division is used regularly by choreographers, dancers, critics, historians, journalists, publicists, filmmakers, graphic artists, students, and the general public. While the Division contains more than 44,000 books about dance, these account for only a small percent of its vast holdings. Other resources available for study free of charge include papers and manuscript collections, moving image and audio recordings, clippings and program files, and original prints and designs.

Searchable database containing streaming video files of dance productions and documentaries by influential performers and companies of the 20th century. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance. Videos can be browsed by people, role, ensemble, genre, and venue. Material types include documentaries, editorials, instructional, interviews, and performances. Database users may create their own custom playlists and video clips.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. Individuals can access a trove of thousands of videos across these institutions through DPLA's search interface (by selecting the "moving images" filter on results after performing a keyword search).

"Welcome to this free video resource curated by America's longest running dance festival. Click ARTIST, GENRE, or ERA to find dance clips spanning from the 1930s to today. Click GUESS to play a game identifying dancers, or DIVE IN to see a randomly selected video. The collection is constantly growing, and you can click SIGN UP to receive notice of all new videos."

Periodical and Newspaper subscriptions

Reports the latest findings in dance therapy theory, research, and clinical practice. The American Journal of Dance Therapy (AJDT) presents original contributions, case material, reviews, and studies by leading educators and practitioners in the field.

Administered by the dance community, dedicated to all types of performance dance, especially ballet and modern. This site includes a moderated bulletin board, reviews, features, interviews, and links to select dance pages.

To serious students and lovers of dance, Dance Chronicle is indispensable for keeping up with this rapidly changing field. It covers a wide variety of topics, including dance and music, theater, film, literature, painting, and aesthetics. Offering the best from both established dance historians and the new generation of dance scholars, Dance Chronicle is an ideal source for those who love dance, both past and present. Dance Chronicle has featured unique articles on the Bedaya-Serimpi dances of Java and the dancing choirboys of Seville Cathedral. Other, broader articles have presented studies on Renaissance dance, Baroque dance, romantic ballet, and dancing for Broadway, Hollywood, and television. Individual issues have been devoted to Bournonville, Gautier on Spanish dance, the Camargo Society, and Moscow’s Island of Dance. Coverage also includes comprehensive pieces on Sada Yacco, Cyril W. Beaumont, Andrée Howard, Maya Plisetskaya, Merce Cunningham, the Judson Dance Theater, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk.

Articles, book reviews, lists of books and journals received, and reports of scolarly conferences, archives, and other project interests for the dance professional. Theory and methods, evaluation in the different disciplines in dance research.

Formerly Performing Arts Journal, through volume 19, no. 3, September 1997 (E-ISSN: 1086-3281, Print ISSN: 0735-8393).
Under continuous editorship since its founding in 1976, PAJ has been an influential voice in the arts for twenty-six years. Now in an updated format and design, PAJ offers extended coverage of the visual arts (such as video, installations, photography, and multimedia performance), in addition to reviews of new works in theatre, dance, film, and opera. Issues include artists' writings, essays, interviews and dialogues, historical documentation, performance texts and plays, reports on performance abroad, and book reviews.

Full-text news for over 9,000 sources including U.S. and international news sources, major wire services, and hundreds of local broadcasting outlets and blogs. Provides unique coverage of local news outlets, including over 100 Minnesota sources. Paid advertisements are excluded. Collections can be searched by specific title, region, state, country, or continent. Mostly English language news coverage with some 200 titles in Spanish, French, Afrikaans and other languages.

Global Newsstream enables users to search the most recent global news content, as well as archives which stretch back into the 1980s featuring content from newspapers, newswires, and news sites in active full-text format. Provides access to news from the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Australia.

Primary Source Materials

ArchiveGrid provides detailed information about archival, museum, library, and other special collections of historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials, primarily in the United States. ArchiveGrid is not a full-text archive, but it provides sophisticated search functions for locating archives and contacting these institutions.

Search some 3,400 finding aids to collections of archival material at the University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections. A finding aid is a guide and inventory list to a collection of archival materials, personal papers, or manuscripts. For more information about this resource, please see the Finding Aid FAQ or contact the Libraries.

The Performing Arts Archives was established by the University of Minnesota Libraries for the preservation and study of the records relating to the history of theatre, music, dance, and associated organizations in Minnesota. Its goal is to document as fully as possible the activities of individuals and groups in both professional and amateur performing arts throughout the state. The collections include the most important companies in each of the major arts fields.

Style Manuals and Writing Guides

Citation managers are software packages used to create personalized databases of citation information and notes. They allow you to:
import and organize citation information from article indexes and other sources
save links to pdfs and other documents, and in some cases save the document itself
format citations for your papers and bibliographies using APA and many other styles
include your own notes